Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Leg-go

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:16

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of our round the verse i'm sandi gardiner and i'm chris roberts today we'll dive into in-game chat scanning prosthetic limbs and some useful back-end tools but first we have news on the state of object containers streaming and alpha 3.3 yes so both alpha 3.3 and object container streaming have now spent some time in the hands of the other catty and the good news is OCS object contain streaming is performing much better than anticipated and we're seeing frame rates well not all of them but some up in the triple digit range which is pretty awesome with these huge increases we've redistributed developer bandwidth by shifting focus exclusively to our build that includes OCS this means instead of releasing out for 3.3 without OCS so the

2. 00:01:05

   live servers at citizencon we've decided instead to open the PTU to all backers on october 10th with a bill that includes OCS and all the performance gains that comes with it this will allow us to get the content and improvements into your hands even faster than we would have done with the other plan Hurston a lava will soon be added afterwards in an incremental 3.3 patch very cool so 3.1 and 3.2 we're date-based releases what happened with 3.3 object container streaming is a foundational technology for the game it's one of the the big remaining things that we've got to get working properly originally it was sort of iffy whether it was going to make the date so he said well we're going to shift it at the same time putting two builds out in the hands of our vacati members and ultimately the rest of the community to test it but

3. 00:01:54

   when we went out there a couple of things happen one the ever catty were really quite excited by the potential performance gains and of course we were too because it was nice to sort of see it validated properly in the real world you know you guys should the other aspect of is we're doing stuff at a huge amount of detail on fidelity so we had to do a full refactor of the system because the most games if you play games and streaming happens a lot in sort of single-player games where they know which way you're going so they sort of starts a stream the level that's ahead of you in as you get towards it but it's very linear know exactly where the players going with us we don't know where the player because you can go anywhere in the star system and then on top of that you need to stream a load in the object containers in the background while you're still playing the game and so everything that does the loading of not just the textures the models but the

4. 00:02:45

   data format you know the objects that all the entities that are contained in these object containers has to happen in the background multi-threaded so we had to do a huge pass over all the game code because a lot of the game code in lumberyard assumes you're just running on the main thread we have to do a lot of initiation of all the entities and all the loading and everything all has to be on you know background worker threads it's a pretty monumental amount of engineering we working on the foundations of this for a couple of years and so this is easily as big if not bigger than 64 from 32 bit precision the 64 bit precision we did a few years ago because it's multiplayer and I have freedom of choice that it makes it more complex on the back end in your yeah and

5. 00:03:35

   it's writing behind the scenes because you don't know which way I'm gonna go and so it makes the engineering more complicated on the back end most single-player games they know where you're going and so that transition is much easier to program on the game code yes whole development stuff we had a sort of come to Jesus meeting on Monday where it felt you know people were having too much context switching going between this branch and this branch which branch meant fixing stuff in so you've now you've now focused in 23.3 with OCS yes so we made it that we made a decision to try and focus all the resources on to OCS because ultimately that's what we're we want to be anyway no matter what and we also feel like that will be better for three point four we live is this imaginary point for why we feel like this will be better for

6. 00:04:24

   three four I mean we still want to be patron day driven on three four so have it by the end of the year and not wasting time on the non OCS branch which is essentially a dead branch means that we'll we'll be having resources dedicated to the three for sooner because they won't have to you know be still trying to fix up OCS because we started on it late because try to get the non OCS out first alright looking to our community our Spanish fans have been at it again yes they certainly have this skynet group just organized an impressive 50 person space panel they entered the hall affair by lining up all 50 participants and firing the prospectors mining laser through all of them ouch hey well we're gonna have to start putting a safety warnings on

7. 00:05:11

   those things obviously it's not having meant to be used now on to development updates the gameplay feature and UI teams have been working on ongoing improvements to the in-game chat system recent updates include new channels and settings and an updated visor display VoIP continues to be tested as we get the feature ready for its upcoming debut ya internal testing is ramping up we'll get a look at VoIP as well as fight at citizencon next week of course with alpha 3.3 currently in the PTU we've already seen some of our ever Katzie testers trying out the tech and testing it themselves meanwhile deaths continue to polish the improve scanning system

8. 00:06:01

   right now the system is being fleshed out differentiating between things like my novel assets and ship identification is key with the expansion of scanning capabilities we've been working on a new tool that will help our artists present their work for internal review in the most efficient way possible let's go to Forrest Stefan for a walkthrough of the new back-end tech I want to take you through a new tool that we have developed titled the look development tool so let me go ahead and just grab this lamp basically with a click of a button it hides everything that's inside of the environment and then it just shows what we wanted to show which is a very simple light setup in a very simple room once we have the model in to look Deb mode we have a full feature set we have the ability to do turn tables we have the ability to

9. 00:06:48

   change kind of the lighting condition we also can kind of look at reflection passes so with a click of a button your an hour of time and this tool also ensures that the developers are all reviewing the different assets in the same environment so it creates a sense of cohesiveness during the review process so the last thing that we can look at I'm outside of grim pax you know maybe an artist wants to take a look at the Hornet in a isolated lighting condition so I'm gonna go ahead and just jump in the looked up mode somebody needs a turntable the fact that I'm in Luke death mode I'm gonna go ahead and skip the whole process of building a track view in a camera rig etc and so forth and I'm gonna go ahead and just toggle my capture 60 frames per second sets my path hit OK and now it's automatically capturing a turntable for

10. 00:07:37

    me it's not a feature that's for the game it's a feature that's for the development of the game it's an efficient means to get the asset approved faster and that means the faster we can get approved faster we can get into the build the faster we can get it on your computers to play with these assets and that's kind of the advantage of this tool so it seems like this tool will be great for developers but what about for the game itself and for the players well it's gonna help the game be more balanced which is really important because we have PPR which is physically based sort of rendering and so therefore the actual materials have made to respond to certain different kind of light levels and so if you've got an artist that's built one to a different

11. 00:08:26

    lighting setup than one that's built over here you put them together they don't fit so while this is going to enable us to do is ensure that we have less clashes in the end result so this prevents that and also creates tools that are better for review so setting up the asset with lights and animation so you can see it takes a bit of time so this will mean that developers can sort of iterate faster and provide more consistent assets I like it very cool moving to grim hack station where forest parked his ship in that last bit the elevator system has finally been fixed this recent dev work should lead to a significant decline elevator based casualties in the area I'll be a good thing so on the backend

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    we've improved the flash tools our UI developers used to allow for on-the-fly changes without having to reload the game world in the editor here is UI creative director zane bien with more so over the past couple of months we've been working on developing some new authoring tools what that is is having a standard API in which gameplay programmers can easily expose variables that we can hook into with the UI the other aspect we've been working on that we turn building blocks and that's basically a first foray into the authoring tool that allows artists and designers to easily place UI elements into the game world currently what we have to do right now is wire framing and prototyping in a separate program then that gets translated into Photoshop and

13. 00:10:05

    then that then has to get translated into flash which finally gets translated into the game engine so one of the eventual goals that we want to get to with this tool is to be able to shift our entire workflow into the game engine so using the same tools to prototype to mock things up and to implement using the same tool set as as the actual implementation then it would save us a massive amount of time and we're talking about weeks down to days for any particular new UI that we need in the game so anyway this is another example of some work that we're doing to increase our pace of iteration our UI team as they're iterating on assets very quickly you know without having to reload the whole game and you know that's five minutes every time they want to do an iteration here it can happen

14. 00:10:52

    instantly so we're working pretty hard on tools to try and increase our development velocity which is a good thing yes we like that the tech art team has recently rigged mission giver Battaglia is prosthetic leg touches like this add a lot to characters filling in their backstory visually like how did she lose that leg I'm sure there's probably a crazy story there right probably you know Steven had a cap I don't know myself either but I am looking forward to seeing he ran out for three point three and that's it for this week don't forget to tune in to reverse the verse live tomorrow at noon pacific on Twitch citizencon is next week and if you won't be joining us in Austin on October 10th make sure you tune in to the live stream all you need to do to join is have an RSI account yes and since we'll be at citizencon and all working to get alpha 3.3 ready for prime time around the verse is going to be taking a break next

15. 00:11:40

    week yes but we will be back after citizencon thanks to all the subscribers and of course to all of our backers and until then we will see you around thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library